Fifty years ago this Sunday, feminist theology of the second wave was born. Well, maybe not born—but it made it into Time, under the headline “Religion: Male and Female Theology.” Yes, Monday, June 27, 1960. The cover picture: US Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II. Here’s how the article opened:

Modern theology should be labeled FOR MEN ONLY, according to one woman who has made a study of the subject. In the current issue of the quarterly Journal of Religion, Valerie Saiving Goldstein, 39, instructor in religion at Hobart and William Smith colleges in Geneva, N.Y., lodges a feminine complaint against contemporary theologians: they are making the mistake of assuming that a thinking man’s theology is equally good for a thinking woman.

The essay cited in the Time article was Saiving’s “The Human Situation: A Feminine View.” Originally published in a scholarly venue alongside a piece by Rudolf Bultmann, it went on to be reprinted in the widely influential anthology Womanspirit Rising, edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (re-issued in 1992 and still available today). As a result, Saiving’s scholarly article was read by generations of feminists—or soon-to-be-feminists—and generations of college and graduate students across the United States and beyond.

. . .

Saiving’s essay focused on much more than the linking of her identity to her theological perspective. She made the argument more broadly that, for example, Christianity’s condemnation of pride and will-to-power as the central human sin and selfless (sacrificial) love as the solution. By emphasizing difference between male and female, masculine and feminine, Saiving pointed to the tragedy of selflessness in the absence of the capacity to develop a self and the risks of disappearance into the lives of others (including one’s children) as typically feminine temptations. As she writes of women’s sins:

They are better suggested by such terms as triviality, distractability, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one’s sense of self-definition; tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence; inability to respect the boundaries of privacy; sentimentality, gossipy sociability, and mistrust of reason—in short, underdevelopment or negation of the self. (Journal of Religion, Vol. 40, No. 2)

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